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This is hardly cutting edge commentary, everyone know s that this has been true since 1999, at least, when The Sopranos premiered and American Beauty won the Best Picture Oscar. Since then TV has become much, much better, and movies even worse. Wolcott is behind the curve again, he should go back to reminiscing about his days hanging out at CBGBs.

That article was really terribly written - or maybe some people like that sort of thing for some reason.

That said, I've always said that a television series has the potential to be a lot better than any movies or books. When you make a movie or write a book, you craft it all at the same time - what happens in the beginning and what happens in the end all flow together - if you decide you want to change something in the end, you can tweak the beginning or middle to make them match.

A TV series can't necessarily do that. What happened in the first season lasts forever; most of the time, TV writers have no idea what will happen in the next 2-3 seasons. (I understand that the writers of 24 rarely had any idea what would happen more than 5-7 episodes in the future.) They're inherently constrained by what's already happened, and they have to work with that, grow and develop their characters, and this pushes them to be more creative and better.

Doesn't always work, of course. A lot of TV is terrible and some film and books are great. But a long-running series has more potential.

"A TV series can't necessarily do that. What happened in the first season lasts forever; most of the time, TV writers have no idea what will happen in the next 2-3 seasons. (I understand that the writers of 24 rarely had any idea what would happen more than 5-7 episodes in the future.) They're inherently constrained by what's already happened, and they have to work with that, grow and develop their characters, and this pushes them to be more creative and better."

It's like courts writing opinions where there are precedents. Doesn't necessarily make the writing better, but it certainly does require creativity to make it come out the way you want.

I liken legal decisions to maintaining an old, large and widely used program.

Adding a new feature has to avoid queering the whole existing structure, because nobody can go back and read and understand all the code put in years ago to check for perverse consequences.

One trick for a new feature, is to first convert it to things that the program already knows about and let it go through the machinery to the point you want to change something; then do the change, converting it all back to something that the machinery knows about already, and then letting the machinery finish the job.

It's a way to guarantee zero interactions with things that already work.

The point of precedent is not tradition but avoidance of unseen interactions.

One reason movies struggles is that the market has bifurcated between enjoyable crowd-pleasers and pseudo-intellectual highbrow artsy movies.

Television tends to have to involve the former in order to maintain the latter. It's a constraint of sorts that pushes writers to do better.

But, of course, this really one works when we compare the worst of movies with the best of television. The Lord of the Rings trilogy holds up pretty well against Game of Thrones--both dependent on books, which is what real intellectuals talk about in order to really impress people with their intellectualizing. Reminds me of something Zizek once said, ".....

As soon as I saw the by-line, I quit reading. I will never forget the day when I was sitting through a hurricane, with huge destruction in my neighborhood, and I turned my computer to read that this son of a bitch wrote that he "roots for hurricanes."

I watched about six or seven episodes of Lost. I thought at first that it was some kind of complicated metaphor for the blurred lines between reality, memory and fantasy. No such luck. It wasn't Prospero's island. Whoever was writing it was making it up as he went along, and the series was an elaborate metaphor for television's need to sell advertising.....I've got high hopes for Game of Thrones. It seems to mix and match Arthurian legends, Tolkien, Mongol Hordes, and Shakespeare's histories in a satisfying way. The first show this season lacked arterial bleeding and nudity, but I'm hooked.